The Complete Guide of Magento 2 Gift Card Delivery Configuration

Recently, gift cards have been increasingly favorable among ecommerce shoppers. Because of its useful features and convenience, a gift certificate can be purchased by shoppers for themselves as well as treated as a gift for other people. Hence, equipping your Magento stores with a Gift Card extension is definitely a strategic investment that will beneficial to your business a lot. With Gift Card Magento 2, there are various functions that can be configured to suit your demands. This post focuses on helping shop admins to configure Gift Card delivery function in Magento so that their customers will be much happier with more choices provided.

Types of Gift Cards

Gift cards come in three forms. The difference isn’t really about the card itself, it’s about how the card reaches the person receiving it, which is what you’ll be configuring for the rest of this guide.

Physical gift cards are printed vouchers. The customer buys one, it ships to an address, and the recipient redeems it at checkout by presenting the card in store or entering its code online. It’s the only type that exists as an object someone can wrap and hand over.

Digital gift cards exist purely as a code. The moment the order is placed, the card is sent straight to the recipient — to an email address, or as an SMS to a phone number — and lives in an inbox or a message thread. Nothing ships, and nothing waits on a carrier. A recipient who still wants something tangible can simply print it.

Combined gift cards sit in between: the same card is both shipped and sent digitally. That’s why buyers are asked for the recipient’s email address and shipping address during purchase. The recipient can start spending from the code immediately while the printed card is still in transit — useful when a gift needs to arrive on time but should also feel like a gift.

So the type your customer picks decides the route the card travels: through a carrier, through an inbox, or through a phone. Those three routes behave very differently on speed, cost, and whether the card actually gets noticed — worth settling before you open a single configuration screen.

Email vs. SMS vs. Physical: Which delivery method should you use?

After designing the gift cards as you want, you should decide how the card should reach the recipient. Each method has a different cost, speed, and read rate — and most stores end up using more than one.

A practical rule: Make email the default, offer SMS as an opt-in upgrade for time-sensitive orders, and keep physical cards for in-store and premium SKUs. The Magento 2 Gift Card extension lets you enable all three side by side and expose them as delivery options on the product page — so the customer picks, and you don’t have to guess.

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Gift Card Workflow

To understand Magento 2 Gift Card configuration guide, you need to know the working process of gift cards. Here is a complete circle of how gift cards work:

• Customer sets the value of the gift card: To create gift cards, the customer needs to define the value of the voucher. It could be a fixed amount he enters or an option from the list made by the store.
• Customer completes the information and designs: Thanks to Magento 2 Gift Card extension by Mageplaza, users can select eye-catching templates, upload their own gift card images, and enter essential details such as Sender Name & Email, Recipient Name & Email and messages. They can configure the delivery method: via post (for physical gift vouchers) or via email/SMS (for virtual gift certificates) or both (for combined gift cards)
• Customer purchases the gift card: Gift cards are now treated as other products in your store so that your shopper can easily complete checkout.
• Recipient receives the gift card: The recipient will receive an email containing the purchased gift cards (for virtual or combined vouchers), or receive a package containing the physical gift card
• Recipient spends the gift card: Now the recipient can use the gift card as a payment method to pay for the order in your store. The gift card balance will be updated after they use it.

Now let’s see how you can finish Magento 2 Gift Card configuration to deliver virtual gift codes.

How to configure Gift Card delivery in Magento 2

First, in the backend from your Admin Panel, select Store then choose Configuration to start managing delivery function. Provided that you finish enabling gift card general configuration for your stores, now go to Gift Card Product Configuration. In this field, you can yourself decide the valid lifetime for a card and enable Delivery Date and Select Timezone by selecting Yes in the field box.

After that, focus on the main setting by navigating Email Configuration and SMS configuration. These functions allow buyers to receive to send the digital gift vouchers via email addresses or phone numbers besides physical certificates.

Email Configuration

To deliver gift card codes via email, you need to start with email configuration:

First, turn on Email Notification by setting Yes in the option box. Next, configure Email Sender by choosing one option in the field box. Based on your intention and your store system, you can decide among five default selections: General Contact, Sales Representative, Customer Support, Custom Email 1, and Custom Email 2. Normally, the most chosen option is General Contact.

In the Gift Card Email Template, please select the email template you would like to use to send the gift card. In the Send To field: After the gift card is sent by customer’s email, it will be sent to these emails as well.

Gift Card Update Notification

• Select Yes in the Enabled field to allow sending gift card update notifications via email
• In the Gift Card Update Email Template field: Choose the email template

Before Expired Notification

• Select Yes in the Enabled field to allow sending a reminder email to users before the gift card is expired.
• In the Before Expired Email Template field: Choose the email template
• In the Before Expired Day(s) field: Enter the number of days before the gift card is expired to send the reminder email.

Notify Sender After Gift Card is Sent

• Select Yes in the Enabled field to allow sending confirmation email to senders after the gift card is sent
• In the Sender Confirmation Email Template field: Choose the email template

Gift Card Unused Notification

• Select Yes in the Enabled field to allow sending a notification email to recipients after the gift card is left unused
• In the Unused Notification Email Template field: Choose the email template
• In the After Unused Day(s) field: Enter the number of days after the gift card is sent but left unused to send the notification email.

Customer Balance Update Notification

• Select Yes in the Enabled field to allow sending an email to customers to update their gift card balance
• In the Customer Balance Email Template field: Choose the email template

SMS Configuration

Besides email, admins can send gift codes via SMS as well. Magento 2 Gift Card configuration also allows you to enable that function when following these steps:

• Select Yes in the Enable SMS Delivery to enable this delivery method.
• In the management page, you can see some fields under Store View as they will appear in the product page when customers decide to send gift vouchers via SMS. With these fields: Twilio Account SID, Twilio Token, and Sender Phone Number, you do not need to make any change for them as buyers will fill in their information.

• The very last part needs to set up is the SMS message. In this field, you can decide what content will appear in the message sent to recipients. For example, there are some fundamental parts which are Sender Name, Gift Card Code, Gift Card Message, Gift Card Balance, Gift Card Status, Gift card Expired date, and Store Url.

Gift Card Update Notification

• Select Yes in the Enabled field to allow sending an email to customer to update their gift card balance
• In the SMS Message field: Enter your message to send via SMS

Before Expired Notification

• Select Yes in the Enabled field to allow sending an email to customer to update their gift card balance
• In the Message field: Enter your message to send via SMS

Once you already finish all these steps, do not forget to click on the Save Config button right on the top of the Magento 2 Gift Card configuration page to save adjustments for your stores.

Learn more: Email notifications for Magento 2 Gift Cards

Troubleshooting Gift Card Delivery

Most “the gift card never arrived” tickets trace back to one of three causes. Check them in this order.

Gift card emails land in spam — or never send at all

Magento’s default mail transport is the server’s PHP mail() function, which almost no inbox provider trusts anymore.

Work through this in order:

1. Switch to a real transactional email service. Go to Stores > Configuration > Advanced > System > Mail Sending Settings and point Magento at an SMTP provider (SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES, Postmark). This alone resolves most gift card deliverability problems.
2. Authenticate your sending domain. Publish SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for the domain in your sender address. Without DKIM, Gmail and Outlook will filter transactional mail no matter how clean the content is.
3. Check the sender address actually exists. Under Stores > Configuration > General > Store Email Addresses, make sure the sender you picked in the Gift Card email config (General Contact, Sales Representative, and so on) is a real mailbox on your own domain — not a Gmail or Yahoo address, which will fail DMARC alignment.
4. Confirm the template isn’t broken. If you cloned an email template and left a variable unresolved, the message can render empty. Send a test to yourself before going live.

Scheduled and reminder notifications never fire

Expiration reminders, unused-card reminders, and balance-update notices are not sent at checkout — they are queued and dispatched by Magento cron. If cron isn’t running, those notifications silently do nothing while the initial delivery email keeps working fine. That combination is the single most commonly misdiagnosed symptom.

Verify cron:

Is the crontab installed for the Magento user?

php bin/magento cron:install
crontab -l

Force a run and watch for errors

php bin/magento cron:run --group=default

Then check the cron_schedule table. Rows stuck at pending with an old scheduled_at, or a pile of error rows, mean cron is not executing. Clear var/locks if jobs are stuck in running after a crash.

If cron runs and the reminder still doesn’t arrive, re-check the day offset. A “notify 7 days before expiry” rule produces nothing for cards that already expired, and nothing for cards more than 7 days out.

SMS delivery fails, or only reaches some numbers

Twilio’s own logs (Console > Monitor > Logs > Messaging) show the exact error code for every attempt — check there before assuming the Magento side is broken.

Default Magento vs. Mageplaza Gift Card: What You Actually Get

One distinction first: Magento Open Source ships with no gift card functionality at all. Native gift cards exist only in Adobe Commerce. So the real comparison is between Adobe Commerce’s built-in gift cards and a dedicated extension.

If you’re on Open Source, an extension isn’t an upgrade — it’s the only path. If you’re on Adobe Commerce, the gap is concentrated in delivery and lifecycle marketing: SMS, scheduled sends, expiry and unused-card reminders, and the card designer are exactly where native gift cards stop and Mageplaza’s Gift Card extension continues.

FAQs

Can I schedule a Magento 2 gift card to be delivered on a specific date?

Yes. When the gift card is added to the cart, the customer can choose a delivery date, and the card is held and sent on that date. This is what makes gift cards workable for birthdays and holidays rather than only for last-minute buys. Scheduled sends depend on Magento cron running on the store, so confirm cron is active before you rely on it.

What happens if the customer types the recipient’s email address wrong?

The email goes to the wrong address and, like any email, cannot be recalled. That’s why admins can resend a gift card from the backend to a corrected address, and why enabling the “notify sender” option matters — it surfaces the mistake quickly. As a preventive measure, add a confirm-email field to the gift card form and show the recipient address on the order confirmation page.

Can an expired gift card be extended or reactivated?

Yes. Expiry is an editable date on each gift card record in the admin, so support can push the date forward for a customer who missed the window. You can also set expiry globally for all cards or leave individual cards with no expiry at all. Check your local regulations first — several jurisdictions restrict or prohibit gift card expiration.

Can I send gift card SMS to international phone numbers?

Yes, but two things must be configured on the Twilio side. First, upgrade past the trial account — trial accounts only send to phone numbers you’ve verified. Second, enable the destination countries under Twilio’s Messaging Geographic Permissions, which blocks international destinations by default. Numbers must be stored in E.164 format, including the country code.

Why is my gift card email not arriving?

In order of likelihood: the store is still using PHP mail() instead of an authenticated SMTP service; the sending domain has no SPF, DKIM, or DMARC records; the configured sender address doesn’t exist on your domain; or Magento cron isn’t running, which blocks scheduled and reminder emails specifically. Working through those four covers almost every case.

Do gift card notifications require Magento cron?

The delivery email at purchase does not, but every time-based notification does — expiration reminders, unused-card reminders, and scheduled deliveries are all queued and dispatched by cron. If those are silent while purchase emails work normally, cron is the first thing to check.

The bottom line

Magento 2 Gift Card configuration of gift codes delivery is not quite difficult, especially when you are using Mageplaza Gift Card extension since all easy-to-understand instructions are presented in each step. Additionally, other available functions in this extension are also friendly to configure. Therefore, why don’t you still hesitate? Let Mageplaza Gift Card extension put a hand to significantly help you satisfy even the most difficult customers. If you want to find out more surpass advantages of this extension, please visit our web page for more details.